Digital health

Timeline

• 1990Worldwide adoption of electronic medical records has been on the rise since 1990.
• 2015Before this strategy was published, the World Health Organization made a plan around the beginning of 2015 to use digital health to end Tuberculosis.
• 2018In May 2018, the World Health Organization passed a global strategy for digital health.
• 2020The FDA cannot regulate all healthcare apps, so they use "enforcement discretion", and up until 2020, have chosen not to regulate all digital care programs and apps.

Read

• Assessing the Value of Digital HealthKendall Cortelyou-Ward · 2018Book
• Digital HealthBarrie Gunter · 2006Book
• Digital Health TechnologiesCarolyn Johnston · 2022Book
• Consumer Health InformaticsCatherine Arnott Smith · 2020Book

Watch

• Digital Health IS Your Health Be an ePatient | Mary Anne Schultz | TEDxCSUSBTEDx TalksVideo
• What is Digital Health? An overview of key termsCarol Forde-JohnstonVideo
• Digital Health for the Whole Human | Dr. Alexandra T. Greenhill | TEDxSFUTEDx TalksVideo

Listen

• Digital Health Leaders PodcastCHIMEPodcast
• Digital Health Talks - Changemakers Focused on Fixing HealthcareHealthIMPACT LivePodcast
• The Pulse by Wharton Digital HealthThe Pulse by Wharton Digital HealthPodcast
• The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health PodcastMassively Better HealthcarePodcast

Voices to follow

• Tom Van Daele@TomVanDaele · XBelgian clinical psychologist and researcher in digital mental health
• Daniel Leisegang@dleisegang · XGerman journalist and political scientist
• Kevin Yamazaki@KevinYamazaki · XAmerican technology executive, founder and chief executive officer of Sidebench
• Joshua Ho@joshuawkho · XProfessor of biomedical sciences

By the numbers

• 73.5Global life expectancy (yrs) — global, 2024 (World Bank)
• 10.1Health spend (% GDP) — global, 2023 (World Bank)

Debates

• Should patient health data be widely shared for medical research?One view: Yes, sharing data broadly can accelerate medical discoveries and improve public health outcomes. · Another: No, extensive data sharing poses significant risks to individual privacy and data security.Open question
• Can artificial intelligence (AI) effectively replace human doctors in certain diagnostic tasks?One view: Yes, AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of medical data and images with high accuracy, potentially surpassing human capabilities. · Another: No, human doctors offer critical empathy, nuanced judgment, and the ability to handle complex, ambiguous cases that AI cannot fully replicate.Open question
• Does digital health truly improve healthcare access and equity for all?One view: Yes, digital tools like telemedicine can reach underserved populations and reduce barriers to care, especially in remote areas. · Another: No, the digital divide means many lack access to necessary technology or internet, potentially worsening disparities for vulnerable groups.Open question

Glossary

• TelemedicineHealthcare services delivered remotely using telecommunications technology.
• Wearable technologyElectronic devices worn on the body that monitor and track health-related data.
• Electronic Health Record (EHR)A digital version of a patient's paper chart, containing their medical history.
• Health informaticsThe field focused on managing and analyzing health data and information to improve healthcare.
• mHealthMobile health, referring to the practice of medicine and public health supported by mobile devices.
• InteroperabilityThe ability of different information systems to communicate and exchange data seamlessly.

Careers

Roles this can lead toward

Student research

Published policy papers by One Young India delegates — every delegate leaves published under their own name.

• A Critical Look at India's Digital DivideShreeyans Sharma
• Unified Disaster Digital Twin of IndiaPurvi Teotia
• Rethinking Education in the Digital Age: Bridging the Gap Between Technology and AccessGovind Mehra
• The Role of Mental Health in Shaping Young Adults’ Positive Attitude and Emotions for Holistic Development: The India ScenarioAmartya Krishnaditya
• Universal Healthcare- Best Practices around the World and in IndiaSyed Fazil Shariq SA

Threads 5

Where this connects to other fields — and why it's worth knowing.

• Ritual and Practice Religion

  The placebo effect, where a fake treatment still makes you feel better, gets stronger the more dramatic the ritual is. Two sugar pills beat one, and a (fake) injection beats a pill. That means the theater around medicine, the ceremony and the needle, isn't just decoration; it's an active ingredient your brain responds to.

• The Scientific Method Science

  Super-sensitive scans can spot tiny tumors so harmless you'd have died of old age never knowing they were there, yet once you know, you get surgery, worry, and side effects. So scanning everyone for everything can actually invent sick people and hurt them. Catching something 'early' isn't automatically better, sometimes the smartest move is not to look.

• Signal & Image Processing Mathematics

  When your smartwatch warns of a weird heartbeat, it's doing signal processing right on your wrist. It uses the same filtering math that pulls a clear song out of a staticky radio. That math takes your jittery, noisy pulse and cleans it up enough to spot a real problem, no doctor's office required.

• Slavery, Race & Rights History

  Some machines that measure how well your lungs work still adjust the results based on race, and that 'correction' traces back to slavery-era doctors claiming Black people's lungs were naturally weaker. A false, racist idea from centuries ago got quietly wired into the software of a modern medical device, and it's still shaping who gets diagnosed today.

• Nuclear Energy Technology

  The nuclear reactors some people want shut down also make the radioactive tracers used in cancer scans. Shut them off, and hospitals could go dark before the power grid ever does. The thing that scares us is quietly keeping patients alive.